A special exhibition featuring "fashion art" pioneer Keum Ki-sook at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art has surpassed 700,000 cumulative visitors, setting the all-time record for a single exhibition in South Korea.
According to the Seoul Museum of Craft Art on Sunday, the special donation exhibition "Dancing, Dreaming, Enlightening," which opened on December 23 last year, exceeded 700,000 visitors as of the previous day's tally. The milestone was achieved just 70 days after opening. The figure is overwhelming compared to the Ron Mueck solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, which drew significant attention last year but took 90 days to surpass 500,000 visitors. The exhibition is drawing an average of 15,000 visitors on weekdays and up to 20,000 on weekends.
Keum established the concept of Korean "fashion art" and was a pioneering artist who expanded clothing into art in the early 1990s. She built a distinctive artistic world by incorporating environmental issues and recycling into her work early on, using non-traditional and discarded materials such as wire, beads, silk gauze, sequins, and waste materials.
She is widely known for the "placard bearer costumes" dubbed "Snow Fairies" at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics opening ceremony. The works, which reinterpreted the lines and structure of hanbok in a modern way using her signature wire technique, established Korean fashion art as a national cultural icon.
Keum donated a total of 56 works across 55 items, valued at approximately 1.31 billion won ($900,000), to the Seoul Museum of Craft Art. The collection includes early fashion art experiments, representative wire dresses, hanbok sculptural works, recent upcycling pieces, and archival materials. This special exhibition was organized based on the donated works.
The white dress "Baekmae (White Plum)" at the exhibition's entrance creates a fantastical atmosphere, with the garment made of wire and transparent beads floating suspended in a pitch-black space. This piece became popular as a "photo zone" and quickly went viral after opening. Interest in the "Snow Fairy" costumes from the PyeongChang Winter Olympics grew further as the exhibition coincided with the 25th Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Various dresses and jackets drew attention with their shadows becoming part of the artwork. The hanbok pieces in particular have been praised for their Korean aesthetic, combining Keum's distinctive use of materials with the beauty of movement and empty space.
With daily "open runs" of visitors rushing in each morning, the museum extended the exhibition by one week from the original closing date of March 15 to March 22. "This exhibition has gained broad public resonance despite featuring fashion art, a subject that may be somewhat unfamiliar even within the craft field," said Kim Su-jeong, director of the Seoul Museum of Craft Art. "Many people who hadn't seen the exhibition visited over the weekend and holidays."
The exhibition is free and requires no reservation. Extended hours until 9 p.m. are offered every Friday.